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4.04 AVERAGE
4.04 AVERAGE
challenging
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
yes, but don’t forget that to write anything at all my basic material is the word.
who hasn’t ever wondered: am i a monster or is this what it means to be a person?
though the anonymous girl in this story is so ancient that she could be a biblical figure. she was subterranean and had never flowered. i’m lying: she was grass.)
, vagueness was the insides of nature.
she was supersonic in life.
the search for the word in the dark.
and take myself off as if taking off clothes
but i want the worst thing of all: life
does my breath deliver me to god? i am so pure that i know nothing.
life eats life.
—what is the weight of life?
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
reflective
medium-paced
Muito floreio, pouca literatura. O primeiro terço é insuportável. Chaaaaaaaaato.
'Since, as strange as it may seem, she believed. She was only fine organic matter. She existed. That's it. And me? The only thing known about me is that I breathe.'
So, my first encounter with the writing of Clarice Lispector turns out to be with the text that was to be her last encounter with her own writing. I suppose I should have begun closer to the beginning but instead I decided to begin with the text that looked like the best, or at least the one most highly praised here on Goodreads and elsewhere. Indeed, it didn't disappoint. Hour of the Star is a terrific novel from almost every point of view, its greatest flaw being that it's over all too quickly.
Most of us think in fairly straightforward terms about writing a novel; here's a character, here's a story. At best we get a dialogic plot with multiple characters and an intertwined narrative maybe combining a couple of stories. In Hour of the Star, however, we get two separate yet obviously intertwined narratives, one of an author and the other of his subject, the story of a writer haunted by a female character he feels abstractly compelled to write about, and then her story as he tells it. Thus the novel gives us two separate and quite different characters who aren't, predictably juxtaposed (a very poor ignominious young female typist and an older male writer of some sort) but rather drawn together by the author's inexplicable desire to write her story.
As a writer and voracious reader I've loved meta-narrative novels ever since first reading Phillipe Sollers The Park back in college in Nanos Valeoritis's Nouveau Roman course. But this was more interesting to me as a novel given that both the writer and the writer's character were so far from any hint of auto fiction or traditional modernist self-revision in novel form. Each of the two terms had, of course, some small something in common with Lispector herself, yet both seemed much more products of the imagination and the text constructed their own insecurities and vagueness in a way that made than rather startling literary characters, really quite original creations both: the writer groping to find something concrete perhaps in the words and the story he feels compelled to tell, writing about a character so ignominious and ignored that she seemed to approach life in the very same way, as a search for something substantial that's always eluded her. Two people unsure they exist circling around the very concept of self awareness and some kind of philosophically certain sense of being. Mere thinking is not always enough to convince us we exist.
Most of us think in fairly straightforward terms about writing a novel; here's a character, here's a story. At best we get a dialogic plot with multiple characters and an intertwined narrative maybe combining a couple of stories. In Hour of the Star, however, we get two separate yet obviously intertwined narratives, one of an author and the other of his subject, the story of a writer haunted by a female character he feels abstractly compelled to write about, and then her story as he tells it. Thus the novel gives us two separate and quite different characters who aren't, predictably juxtaposed (a very poor ignominious young female typist and an older male writer of some sort) but rather drawn together by the author's inexplicable desire to write her story.
As a writer and voracious reader I've loved meta-narrative novels ever since first reading Phillipe Sollers The Park back in college in Nanos Valeoritis's Nouveau Roman course. But this was more interesting to me as a novel given that both the writer and the writer's character were so far from any hint of auto fiction or traditional modernist self-revision in novel form. Each of the two terms had, of course, some small something in common with Lispector herself, yet both seemed much more products of the imagination and the text constructed their own insecurities and vagueness in a way that made than rather startling literary characters, really quite original creations both: the writer groping to find something concrete perhaps in the words and the story he feels compelled to tell, writing about a character so ignominious and ignored that she seemed to approach life in the very same way, as a search for something substantial that's always eluded her. Two people unsure they exist circling around the very concept of self awareness and some kind of philosophically certain sense of being. Mere thinking is not always enough to convince us we exist.
dark
emotional
fast-paced
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
emotional
funny
inspiring
reflective
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I found the narrator’s creative struggles to be the most interesting pov of this book. Having a story to tell that isn’t necessarily positive or the most fun to tell but every ounce of your being has to commit to it anyway and see where it takes you.
I highlighted so many beautiful lines.
I highlighted so many beautiful lines.